Seminar on analytical philosophy texts

Teacher(s)

Guay Alexandre ;

Language

Français

Online resources

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Prerequisites

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Main themes

Explications of celebrated texts by founding fathers of contemporary logic and philosophy of language.

Aims

The course aims at providing students with tools that would allow them to read, to interpret and to comment on philosophical texts of analytical style. At the end of the course they should in particular be able to understand what is at stake in the philosophical debates concerning logic and language and, if they wish it, to commence a research in this area. Moreover, they will be able to locate these texts in the overall context of philosophy.

The contribution of this Teaching Unit to the development and command of the skills and learning outcomes of the programme(s) can be accessed at the end of this sheet, in the section entitled “Programmes/courses offering this Teaching Unit”.

Evaluation methods

The evaluation consists of two elements: general participation in class (50%) and an exam in which the students will be asked to explain a text chosen from the analytical philosophy corpus (50%).
During the second session, the evaluation consists of the participation grade plus a new exam. If the participation grade has already been used or is absent, the evaluation will consist of the new exam + 5 review essays.

Teaching methods

This course will mostly consist of discussions around the studied texts. Students will be assigned to each text. Their role will be to present the context of the paper (in collaboration with the teacher) and to direct the discussion. The discussion will be structured based on the students' reactions to the text that will have been sent to the assigned students before the class.

Content

The choice of texts will reflect the diversity of subjects and styles in analytical philosophy. Nevertheless, a theme will relate all texts, the 2016-17 theme will be Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus. The number of texts discussed will depend of the learning speed of the group but we envisage to read texts from Wittgenstein (the majority of the Tractatus and parts of the Philosophical investigations), Carnap and Quine.

Bibliography

A bibliography and texts will be available via the course's website.

Other information

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